Kennett Square changes time off policy

Kennett Square borough workers won’t call in sick anymore. That’s because sick days have been eliminated.

Council last week adopted a new personnel manual that eliminates sick days, personal days and vacation days and instead establishes a new category that combines all three, called Personal Paid Time Off, or PTO. The new policy affects all non-bargaining unit employees.

The new policy adds two holidays, the day after Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve Day. It also changed bereavement leave to add in-laws. It takes effect Jan. 1, 2013.

“The idea behind this is to reward good employees by allowing them to take more time, not to punish but to encourage employees who take a lot of sick leave to begin thinking about why they are taking sick leave,” said Borough Manager Brant Kucera. “This creates more time off for good employees.”

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New employees are permitted 40 hours of PTO after six months of employment. After one year, workers are entitled to 120 hours of PTO. But time off is prorated based on time of service. If an employee leaves after a year and a month, that worker would be entitled to pay for 120 hours plus a prorated portion of the 13th month.

“After six months of work you are entitled to one week of vacation which I think is unheard of,” said John Thomas of Kennett Square. “It’s not fair to the taxpayers to give out that much paid vacation. I think two weeks after a year is too much. It should be a week of vacation after four years of work, two weeks after five years, and three weeks after 10 years. You guys are very generous with taxpayer money.”

Kucera said the use of PTO instead of vacation, personal and sick time has become common in industry.

“Employees who never get sick, they get more time off, there’s no doubt about it,” Kucera said. “Employees who get sick more often, they actually lose time.”

Kucera said his there is little he can do to control employees who often call in sick.

“What am I supposed to do with an employee who gets sick twice a month,” he said. “So what. It happens. Maybe they’re sick, maybe they’re not, but quite frankly, I can’t do much about that.”

Councilman Dan Maffei said he favors the new policy.

“We’re eliminating vacation completely,” he said. “There are no sick days. There are no personal days. It is all lumped together. If a worker takes the full allotment of time off and gets sick, they won’t get paid.”

Employees who used their full allotment of sick, vacation and personal time will actually lose time under the new policy, which was drafted with the help of a committee consisting of two salaried borough employees and three hourly employees.

The new manual gives workers who have been employed between one and five years 160 hours total time off. Under the current manual, the same workers get 120 hours of sick leave, 24 hours of personal time and 80 hours of vacation for a total of 224 hours. The total hours available to employees who use all their time is 64 hours less during the course of a year.